Workers Think Automation Would Boost Productivity

By Dennis McCafferty | Posted 2017-10-12

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Workers Think Automation Would Boost Productivity

Sidetracked by emails, meetings and outdated tech, employees spend too little of their day working on important tasks. But they think automated tools could help.
Overtime

The average employee surveyed works 44.1 hours a week.
Distracted State

These employees spend, on average, only 44% of their day performing the primary duties of their job.
Top Work Productivity Obstacles

Time-wasting meetings: 57%
Excessive emails: 53%
Unexpected phone calls: 39%
Most Commonly Used Office Tools

Email: 94%
Spreadsheets: 78%
Shared documents: 77%
Shared networks and/or folders: 73%
Handwritten to-do lists: 57%
Inundated In-Box

The average employee surveyed receives 68 emails a day: 21 are junk and 27 require an answer.
E-Gripes, Part I

55% of employees said they have to deal with lengthy emails that contain information that would have been conveyed better in a conversation. The same percentage said they too often need to follow a conversation through a lengthy email thread.
E-Gripes, Part II

54% of the survey respondents said they often get copied on emails that aren't relevant to their job, and 50% said "replies to all" can create workplace issues.
Office Aide

65% believe that at least 20% of their day-to-day tasks should be automated.
Time Management

86% said the use of automation would allow them to be more innovative, and 69% said it would give them more time to do their primary job.
Home Office

The average employee surveyed works from home eight hours a week.
Adjustable Hours

79% of the survey respondents said they have the ability to take advantage of flextime.
Overused Buzz Words and Phrases

"Think outside the box": 47%
"Synergy": 18%
"Bandwidth": 18%
"Circle back": 13%
"At a high level": 12%
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Employees spend less than half of their day doing the job they were hired to do, according to a recent survey from Workfront. The fourth annual "State of Enterprise Work" report indicates that attending time-wasting meetings, fielding excessive emails and taking unexpected phone calls account for far too much of the day. But productivity is also restricted because workers are constantly limited to traditional and often outdated office tools, such as old email systems, spreadsheets or even handwritten to-do lists. However, they believe that with automation, at least one-fifth of their tasks could be handed over to a machine. With this, they're convinced they'd have more time to be innovative and to complete primary work functions. "Forward-looking companies must recognize today that tomorrow's enterprise work cannot be executed via yesterday's email and spreadsheets," according to the report. "Tomorrow's solutions must automate the manual work of organizing, communicating and reporting on work and provide the right data at the right time so human knowledge workers can do their best work, faster than ever before." As a somewhat humorous finding, the report includes the most overused office buzz words or phrases, and we've included those here. More than 2,000 employees took part in the research, which was conducted by Regina Corso Consulting.